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Rollins College 

Its Field and Its Future 



ROLLINS COLLEGE 

Its Field and Its Future 



ROLLINS COLLEGE 

Its Field and Its Future 



An Address delivered on the occasion of his 
Inauguration as President of Rollins College, 
April second, Nineteen Hundred and Three 



BY 



WILLIAM FREMONT BLACKMAN, Ph.D. 



Winter Park, Florida 
MCMIII 






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ROLLINS COLLEGE 

Its Field and Its Future 

The president of a college in these days occupies a 
position and confronts a task of no little difficulty. Con- 
sider the several and diverse groups of people with whom 
he must deal — a Board of Trustees whose standards of 
efficiency are, and ought to be, primarily financial; a 
faculty whose ideals are academic, and each of whom is 
forever, and very properly, urging the claims of his own 
department to larger consideration and more generous 
treatment ; a group of students, some of them bright and 
ambitious, some dull and indifferent, some incurably in- 
dolent, some vicious, and all of them callow and head- 
strong; parents who have entrusted their most precious 
interests to his care, and who expect him to give to each 
particular boy and girl a father's solicitous attention, or 
even, perhaps, to correct faults for which they them- 
selves are responsible; patrons who are looking sharply 
to see whether their gifts are well spent; a public, local 
and general, which must be kept informed, interested, 
and sympathetic with respect to the affairs of the insti- 
tution ; and a newspaper press, well-disposed, indeed, yet 
naturally enough ready to proclaim abroad as on the 
housetop every mistake or dispute or escapade which 
may occur. At the point where all these contrary cur- 
rents converge, the president must stand, receiving their 
bufferings in his own person and doing what in him lies 
to blend them all into one consentaneous and advancing 
movement. For this task, what gifts and graces he 
ought to possess. He should be prompt and daring yet 



6 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

cautious; tactful, yet not politic; shrewd, yet not sly; 
ready to accept unflinchingly any burden of responsibil- 
ity, yet skilled in the fine art of shifting responsibility 
to other shoulders. He ought to be as youthful in heart 
as the youngest student on the campus, yet as experi- 
enced and steady of head as the oldest trustee. He 
should be as broad and accurate a scholar as any member 
of his faculty, and as inspiring a teacher. He should 
have all the ardor for science which the chemist has, and 
all the interest in art which the painter and the pianist 
feel. He should be as enthusiastic for athletics as is 
the physical director, yet as insistent on scholarship and 
as concerned for the spiritual welfare of his wards as is 
the recluse to whom base-ball is an offence. He should 
be as persuasive a beggar as is the financial agent, and 
as close an economist and shrewd an investor as is the 
treasurer. He must needs have upon his garments the 
flavors of the cloister, else some dear old professor or 
generous donor will grieve, yet these garments must be 
cut in the latest fashion, else the world will smile. He 
should be ready to pay out sage counsels on demand to 
teacher or pupil or parent — wisdom should ooze from his 
pores, and surround him like an atmosphere. He should 
know how to combine a sympathetic heart with an in- 
flexible will; if sympathy be wanting, he will alienate 
his colleagues and fail to elicit their full and hearty co- 
operation, and if his will be weak, shipwreck must in- 
fallibly ensue to the enterprise of which he is at once 
the captain and the pilot. 

All this, our friend Dr. Pearsons has been telling me 
every day during the past three months, the college presi- 
dent ought to be. But all this no man possibly can be — 
and I least of all. Hence, some measure of disappoint- 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 7 

ment for you and for myself must inevitably follow upon 
this happy occasion; let us accept it cheerfully when it 
comes, dedicating ourselves meantime with whatever en- 
dowments we may possess to the work before us. 

On an occasion like this the temptation is strong upon 
one to enter on the discussion of certain problems of 
educational theory and policy which just now engage the 
academic world. That temptation, however, I shall re- 
sist, and address myself rather to the humbler but per- 
haps more useful task of setting forth what I conceive 
to be the particular meaning and mission for to-day and 
for to-morrow of Rollins College. Here we are, a con- 
siderable number of us — trustees, teachers, pupils and 
patrons of the school — and the questions for the hour 
are : Why are we here, rather than elsewhere ? and being 
here, what precisely is the thing we ought to do and 
hope for? 

Well, the most obvious fact in the situation is this, 
that our work is in the Southland, and more particularly 
in this Commonwealth, the most southern of all our 
states, at once so fair and so flat, so endowed with re- 
sources and so smitten with poverty, so flooded with 
sunshine and so stricken by frost, so populous of for- 
ests and so vacant of people. Of all our states is there 
another in whose history there have been mingled such 
high hopes and such silent and indescribable heartbreaks, 
as Florida? 

Consider for a moment this Southland where our work 
is to be done. 

What contrasts there are between life here and in many 
other portions of the country. You live in New England, 
let us say; a population packed and palpitant surrounds 
you ; a hundred elbows are at your side, a thousand 



8 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

voices in your ear every day. And more than half of 
this population is foreign by birth or parentage — Irish, 
German, French-Canadian, Italian, Russian, what not. 
Yonder, so near that you hear the reverberations of its 
life, lies the huge city, New York or Boston, with its 
whirl and flash and ferment of human interests. The 
rural delivery postman lays the metropolitan daily on 
your breakfast table; the express train roars by your 
gate; the telephone clamors in your hall; in the next 
street or in the valley beyond, the factory gathers a thou- 
sand souls under one roof; the palace of the multi-mil- 
lionaire looks down on you from the hillside; a day's 
journey away stands the great university with its three 
or four thousand students; a half dozen colleges qualify 
life throughout the whole region ; and a carefully graded 
public school near at hand carries on its work under 
high pressure nine months in the year, with perhaps 
evening sessions as well, and a vacation school during the 
summer; the trades union binds the working men to- 
gether and breeds in them that class consciousness, and 
that sense of injustice and of power which are at once 
the hopeful and the threatening feature of the industrial 
situation; at the church on Sunday you are apt to hear 
a carefully written essay devoid of theology, but incul- 
cating the duty of the pious or the strenuous and self- 
sacrificing life. And thus humanity besets you behind 
and before, and lays its hand upon you ; and as the winter 
air tingles the fingers and quickens the pulse and the 
pace and reddens the cheek, so the mental and moral 
atmosphere excites the spirit. In all directions, life is 
insistent, strenuous, hurried, impatient. Repose and 
meditation are nearly lost arts ; utility, economy, ef- 
ficiency, promptness — these are the standards by which 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 9 

all things and all men are chiefly appraised. The race is 
to the swift, the sharp, the "smart/' 

How different in the Southland ! Here, men "have 
time" ; they can loiter, converse, ruminate, rest, wait. In 
all this region there is not one great city, not one daily 
newspaper of metropolitan character, not one manufac- 
turing centre of prime importance, only a few factories 
here and there, hardly any millionaires, and those mostly 
imported, few and weak trades unions, a public school 
year which is largely vacation, churches where John Cal- 
vin and John Wesley would still find themselves at home, 
and a population almost purely "Anglo-Saxon" still, 
save for the African millions who are in it, but not 
of it. 

Do not imagine that in this contrast of the north and 
south I mean to praise the one and disparage the other — 
not at all. I do not undertake to argue which is essen- 
tially the finer type of civilization — the industrial and 
civic type of the north or the rural and domestic type 
of the south. My point is this; that there is inevitably 
to be, and is already beginning, a transfusion of the 
one type of life with the other on this southern soil. As 
inevitable as is the flight of time, so inevitable is it that 
the same causes which have already wrought such magic 
transformations in the north and west will transform the 
south as well, and speedily. Here, rather than beyond 
the Mississippi are hereafter to be the true frontiers of 
American life. In the west, the lines are already for the 
most part laid down along which development is likely 
to take place; in the south, that development is certain 
to be, in important respects, a revolution rather than an 
evolution. What has been the central feature and force 
in the recent amazing development of the north and west ? 



io ROLLINS COLLEGE 

Why, this surely: the exploitation and utilization of the 
resources of nature through science, invention, the use 
of machinery, the combination of capital, and the aggre- 
gation and regimentation of labor. And this is what is 
to dominate infallibly in the south also. Here are vast 
areas of rich land, scantily populated ; enormous resources 
within and beneath the soil, hardly touched as yet; raw 
materials for the manufacturer already immense and 
capable of indefinite increase; numerous water powers 
and other sources of energy, almost wholly wasted 
hitherto; a climate in a high degree advantageous for 
many forms of industry; conditions of life peculiarly 
favorable to economy and to health, and numerous deep 
water ports, either natural or artificial. What these con- 
ditions mean for the future of this region, the shrewder 
and more clairvoyant investors and captains of industry 
both here and at the north clearly see, so that the stream 
of ready money and able men is setting ever more swiftly 
southward, to reinforce the efiforts of those, native to the 
soil, who are awakening to the opportunities which lie 
round about them. The astounding growth of the south, 
and of the whole country as well, is seen in such facts as 
these: in i860 less than nine hundred thousand tons of 
pig iron were produced in the United States, to-day the 
south alone produces nearly three millions of tons; then, 
five and three-quarter millions of tons of bituminous coal 
were mined in the whole country, now the south alone 
mines fifty or sixty millions of tons annually; then, the 
whole country manufactured and marketed less than one 
hundred millions of dollars' worth of lumber products, now 
the lumber products of the south alone amount to more 
than twice that sum; then, the whole country produced 
a half million barrels of petroleum, to-day the south alone 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE n 

produces twenty millions of barrels; then, the railway 
mileage of the entire country was something more than 
thirty thousand miles, to-day the south alone has nearly 
sixty thousand miles, and the value of the cotton goods 
manufactured in the south is to-day almost precisely 
equal to that of the whole country forty years ago. The 
last federal census shows that in the last two decades 
the value of farm properties in the south increased by 
seventy-two per cent., as against sixty-seven per cent, for 
the entire country; the amount invested in manufactur- 
ing in the south increased by three hundred and forty- 
eight per cent., as against two hundred and fifty-two 
per cent, for the whole country; while the increase in 
railway mileage was greater by nearly two-thirds here 
than elsewhere. And while the population of the south 
as a whole has not increased so rapidly as that of the 
north, owing to the tendency of immigrants to settle in 
the cities of the north Atlantic seaboard, or to betake 
themselves westward, it should nevertheless not be for- 
gotten that the state of Florida increased her population 
between the years i860 and 1890 by a much larger per- 
centage than did the state of Illinois — including the phe- 
nomenal city of Chicago ; while during the five years fol- 
lowing, that increase was not less than forty per cent. 
There is every reason to believe that except for the 
calamity which befell her at that time, and by which she 
was almost completely prostrated and paralyzed, her 
population would have increased by at least eighty per 
cent, in that single decade — a growth almost unparalleled. 
If I were asked where in America to-day the young 
man can invest his resources of brain and brawn and 
purse, his heart's blood and his prayers, with expecta- 
tion of the largest and most varied ultimate returns, I 



12 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

should unhesitatingly say, "In the south, in Florida." 
And the meaning of all this, for us here, is doubtless 
this : the college — the college of a particular type and 
tone, the college which elsewhere has bred the men who 
to-day in large part furnish brain and heart to this in- 
dustrial and social movement and which they in turn 
have modified — the twentieth century college, if you please, 
which, however, is in essential respects the college of all 
the centuries, at once the conserver of the past, the in- 
structor of the present, and the pioneer of the future — 
this type of college is needed imperatively, and now per- 
haps as nowhere else, here in the south. It is needed in 
part, that it may provide the men, the ideas, the ideals, 
the sciences, the energies and aims, which are essential 
to this industrial process which I have described; and it 
is needed yet more that this process may not become 
material, greedy, luxurious, cruel, unchristian, life's 
master instead of its slave. 

It adds greatly to the interest and importance of our 
work, and something also to its difficulty, that we have 
here, instead of a homogeneous body of students such as 
most colleges have, a four-fold constituency, drawn from 
Florida and the territory adjacent thereto, from the 
northern states, from the Spanish-speaking population of 
Cuba, and from the American immigrants into that isl- 
and. Our chief appeal and mission is to the youth of 
this state, but the number of those who come to us from 
the north because their health is imperiled and their 
studies interrupted by the rigors of winter, is certain 
greatly to augment as soon as the advantages of study 
for such persons in our mild and equable climate are 
more generally understood. The Republic of Cuba will 
doubtless continue to send us many of her brightest and 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 13 

best-bred youth, not only that they may receive academic 
training but also that they may imbibe from their fel- 
low students those ideals and aspirations which are dis- 
tinctively American. And the new-comers in Cuba — in- 
vestors, promoters, planters, merchants, mechanics, teach- 
ers, and other folk — already numerous and likely to be- 
come more so, will find there no fit school of high grade 
for their children. Rollins College stands at the very 
gateway of Cuba, already she has students from that 
island such as I have mentioned, and the number of these 
ought largely to increase. 

See, then, how unique our opportunity is ! To set the 
grandsons of Confederate soldiers and of New England 
abolitionists side by side in the class room, on the 
athletic field and at the dinner table — in all the blessed 
and beautiful fellowships of college days — is to do< what 
in us lies to dissipate misunderstandings and prejudices 
long cherished, and blend indissolubly together elements 
long hostile, and thus to abate what is perhaps the pro- 
foundest peril of our American life. Any boy who has 
studied in Rollins College can never afterward hate the 
north or despise the south. And to fashion here, in ac- 
cordance with American ideas, leaders for the new life 
now dawning on Cuba, is not only to give vital assistance 
to that Republic in the very "nick of time," but is to help 
also toward the solution of those larger problems con- 
cerning the management of the present and future tropi- 
cal dependencies of the United States which we have to 
face. Altogether, I know not whether any other college 
has before it a more important or a more inspiring work. 

But it is said that the climate here is fatal to great 
achievement, that a man must have plowed through snow- 
drifts and had a case or two of chilblains as a boy, else 



H ROLLINS COLLEGE 

there will be no iron in his blood, no initiative in his 
brain; in the tropics, and at their verge, men will only 
dream and loiter. Not once only, but often, I have been 
asked whether it can be expected that really strenuous and 
effective mental discipline can be imparted here. But tell 
me, where on earth has human life been splendid and 
fruitful if not round about the Mediterranean? And did 
the mariners on that blue sea have to fight their perilous 
way to port in winter days through driving sleet, with 
cordage stiff and masts loaded with ice? Was Homer 
braced to immortal song by biting cold? Or Solon, to 
making laws for the world? Or Aristotle, to the inde- 
fatigable research and profound and tireless thought 
which made him the master mind of all ages? Or 
Phidias and the builders of the Parthenon, to their un- 
paralleled achievements in art ? Or Demosthenes, to that 
irrestistible energy of will which was the inmost secret 
of his matchless oratory? Or Alexander the Great, to 
those conquests by which the world was subdued and 
transfigured? Were Julius Caesar and the invincible 
chieftains and warriors of republican and imperial Rome 
wanting in vigor? Or Moses or Elijah or St. Paul, 
or those determined Phoenician traders who explored and 
exploited the ends of the earth in the interests of com- 
merce? Or, in later times, were Mahomet and Charle- 
magne dawdlers ? Or Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio ? 
Or Gallileo and Cervantes and Christopher Columbus? 
Or Giotto and Raphael and Michael Angelo and Leonardo 
da Vinci ? Yet no one of this mighty multitude ever felt 
the tingling exhilaration of zero temperatures, or coasted 
down hill as a boy, or wore a skate. It was beneath the 
orange tree rather than the Siberian crab that Napoleon, 
the Corsican, nurtured the irresistible ambitions of his 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 15 

youth, his dauntless, tireless energy. Think of Athens 
and of Alexandria, of Florence and Genoa and Venice 
and Naples and Rome and Jerusalem — is it not to these 
veritable "seats of the mighty" that we journey as de- 
vout and grateful pilgrims, rather than to the snow 
banks of Russia ? But we ought not to forget that in these 
sacred capitals of religion, culture and heroism, the con- 
ditions of life, so far as these are climatic, were liker by 
far to those of Florida than of Massachusetts or of Min- 
nesota. If there be some lack of energy in the south, this 
is not due directly and in the main to its climate, but 
to ideals and habits which were bred in our people by 
certain of our social institutions, now forever passed 
away. Doubtless, however, there is here, beneath a more 
vertical sun — and ought to be — some slackening of speed 
in the race of life; but, then, we have more days, and 
longer, every year in which to do our work than our 
northern neighbors have, as w r ell as a more responsive and 
fruitful Nature to work upon. And, finally, is it so cer- 
tain that speed and struggle are better than safety and 
sanity, that labor is more sacred than is leisure? What 
if it be true that the vocation of this Southland is, in 
part, to attemper the consuming ambition of the north, 
and steady and flavor and enrich and recuperate our 
American life in these days of unexampled strain after 
wealth and power? Is it so certain that such a vocation 
is to be despised? 

Thus much concerning our location and field; I wish 
now to make two suggestions about the work we ought 
to do and the spirit in which it should be done. And 
of these two suggestions this is the first : Rollins College 
should be content to remain a college. I shall not under- 
take to say at what precise point the college ends and the 



1 6 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

university begins. Both words have been used and are 
still used, in divers senses. The term university had 
one meaning in mediaeval times and it has quite another 
in our day. In France and Germany it signifies one 
thing, in England something quite different, and in the 
United States almost anything you please — for this is the 
"sweet land of liberty/' of academic as well as civil lib- 
erty. And the case is but little better as concerns the 
word college. In so uncertain a matter as this, it would 
be as foolish as discourteous in me to criticise the usage 
of other institutions — surely they have as good a right 
as have we to take upon them whatever name they prefer. 
But for me the university in America must be primarily 
a place for graduate students, to which those who have 
received the Baccalaureate degree, and perhaps other 
mature and properly prepared persons, may resort for 
instruction in the furthermost details of the several 
sciences and arts, and for independent research among 
the more inaccessible sources of human knowledge. Nor 
can I forget this great word universe which lies im- 
bedded in the word university. The true university is 
a place, as Ezra Cornell said, where "any person can find 
instruction in any study," that is, in any study not ade- 
quately provided for in schools of inferior rank. The 
university must not only be prepared to carry advanced 
students to the very horizon of every science, but it must 
also provide the best possible training for the three pro- 
fessions, theology, medicine and law, and for the prac- 
tice of the plastic and musical and industrial arts. Hence 
its library must be immense, containing all the really 
valuable literature bearing upon these several subjects, 
in at least three or four modern languages ; it must have 
laboratories and an aggregation of apparatus and of 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 17 

museums enormous in extent and vastly expensive to 
gather and to care for ; and it must maintain a numerous 
faculty, whose function is not only to teach, but also 
themselves to lead and to guide others in pushing farther 
on the frontiers of our knowledge. In a word, no docu- 
ment, no printed book, no instrument of research, no 
specimen, no personal guidance, which is really essential 
to the understanding by the advanced student of the most 
recondite subject, must be wanting in the true university. 
I am, of course, aware that the conditions I mention are 
ideal, and that there is not in the whole world an institu- 
tion — and never, indeed, can be — which fully meets them 
all. Yet surely a university must in some real sense 
fulfil the pledge which is conveyed in its very name. 
Need I say that as thus defined, there are not half a dozen 
universities in all America— though seven score schools 
are called by that name ? 

A college Rollins is, and will I hope remain. Its aim is, 
not to extend the boundaries of human knowledge, nor 
to train expert investigators, nor to fit for professional 
life, but to breed in the young men and women who 
resort to it a Christian character and a fine and liberal 
culture, which will make them worthy and happy citizens 
at once of this American Republic and of the Kingdom 
of Heaven. After we have done this for them, we shall 
bid them go — such of them as have inclination and 
ability and leisure and means — to the great centres of 
scientific research, of artistic production, and of profes- 
sional training, whether in this country or abroad, for 
further and final preparation for their life tasks. That 
sort of work, depending on that sort of equipment, we 
cannot do in these remote and sparsely peopled regions, 
and that which we cannot do we will not undertake or 



18 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

promise to do. But there are some things which can be 
done here as well as they can be done amid the throngs 
of Berlin or Paris or Oxford. We can introduce the boy 
or girl just as well to those intricacies and amplitudes 
and exactitudes and delicacies and flowing graces of lan- 
guage which give forever to the Greek and Latin tongues 
their unique disciplinary power. Here, just as well as 
anywhere, he can make long and wondrous voyages with 
Odysseus and ^Eneas ; can spread his tent with great 
Caesar beneath the dripping skies of Gaul, or fight with 
Cyrus; can talk with Plato in the Academy, or thrill 
with Cicero's fervid eloquence in the Senate Chamber 
at Rome. Here, as well as anywhere, he can join hands 
with Euclid and thread the wide-reaching and intricate 
but luminous mazes of number and of space. Above 
him stretch heavens of singular lucidity, and around him 
is spread an earth and a sea, fecund with all manner 
of living things ; what hinders that he should not learn 
here as well as anywhere the essential outlines and con- 
tent of astronomy, of physics, of chemistry, of biology? 
Here, as well as elsewhere, he can familiarize himself 
with the drama of human history in its leading features, 
with its vast stage, its star performers, the several acts 
and scenes on which the curtain of the centuries has 
lifted and fallen, its high lights and low, and its inter- 
mingled elements of tragedy and of farce. Here, as well 
as elsewhere, he can master our English tongue, and 
learn the rudiments of those other two in which the mod- 
ern world depicts its ideals and transacts its business, and 
make the acquaintance thus — though slight yet reward- 
ing — of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and 
Tennyson, of Goethe and Schiller, of Moliere and Mon- 
taigne. Here, just as everywhere else, are mind within 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 19 

him and matter without, piquing and plaguing his in- 
tellect with their insistent mysteries — he can be a meta- 
physician, a psychologist, a logician, here as well as in any 
other place. 

Nor are the claims which the "small college" has al- 
ways made for itself of certain educational advantages, 
without justification; for, instead of being herded in 
large classes, committed in large part to the guidance 
of youthful and inexperienced tutors and related some- 
what remotely even to them, students in the smaller 
college are brought into constant and intimate contact 
with teachers of maturity and experience, who are able 
to interest themselves intimately in the progress of each 
individual pupil, and bring steadily to bear upon him 
those quickening influences which, after all, are the most 
vital forces in education. 

Surely, we can agree — can we not? — that he is an 
educated man, a man of culture, whose senses have been 
strengthened and sharpened by close observation, whose 
will has been drilled and disciplined by intense and pro- 
longed application; who understands the function and 
power of language, his own and others, so that he can 
speak and write with lucidity, vigor and charm; who 
has immersed his mind in the great masterpieces of litera- 
ture; who is familiar w T ith history in its great moments; 
who has wrestled successfully with the major problems 
of mathematics ; who knows and can weigh with intelli- 
gence what the great philosophers have had to say; and 
to whom some study of natural science has imparted those 
fundamental concepts, that docility of spirit, that im- 
patience with the abnormal, the devious, the eccentric and 
the merely traditional, those fruitful methods of research, 
and that familiarity with the changeless and luminous 



zo ROLLINS COLLEGE 

laws in accordance with which the processes of the physi- 
cal universe go faithfully on, which are the precious gift 
of science to our time. 

This is the educated man, the man of culture; and 
nothing hinders that he should not be fashioned here, 
as well as in any other place whatsoever. 

And it is precisely because we are a college, and not 
a university, that emphasis has always been placed here 
upon the teacher, rather than upon buildings, equipments, 
endowment and methods — an emphasis which, I trust, 
may never weaken. The processes of education are in- 
deed multifarious, but it is as true now as it was in 
Plato's day that nothing is essential in education — I do 
not mean technical or professional education — but a good 
teacher and an apt pupil, face to face. And who is the 
good teacher? He is the man whose scholarship is 
adequate indeed, but in whom scholarship is not a mere 
accumulation of facts but a vital possession. He is the 
man of character, of equipoise, of virility, of sympathy, 
of alert perceptions, of nimble wit ; he is the man whose 
will can bend but cannot be thwarted, the justice of 
whose judgments can never be questioned; he is the man 
who in mature life knows how to renew his youth like 
the eagle's, the man of exhaustless expedients, tireless, 
adroit, winsome yet dignified and reverent. Such teach- 
ers were Arnold of Rugby and Mark Hopkins of 
Williams College. Or if this good teacher be a woman, 
you will detect in her a certain indefinable distinction of 
mind and character, a personality which impresses itself 
irresistibly, however gently, on others. Her very en- 
trance into a room penetrates it with a subtle sense 
of her presence; she speaks not as a parrot might but 
with an air and accent all her own; she qualifies your 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 21 

feeling and persuades your will as you look at her; she 
can sit below and out of sight in a dormitory filled with 
girls, and every furthermost room shall be flavored as 
with her presence day and night — a spur, a shackle, a 
solace, a sweetness, a mind for the dull and a conscience 
for the careless and a soul for the earthy. Such a 
teacher, perhaps, was Mary Lyon. And now, give us 
teachers here like this, men and women, however scantily 
provided for we may be in the financial and physical ap- 
paratus which we, nevertheless, so sorely need, and we 
shall not fail to impart character and culture to those 
who are committed to our charge. And this is, I verily 
believe, the distinction of Rollins College, that she has 
had and still has teachers measurably answering to these 
ideals. I do not think there are any better. 

But while we are content to remain a college, it will 
not be precisely a college of traditional fashion. Already 
we have introduced into the curriculum such studies as 
bear more directly on the practical conduct of life and 
the earning of one's daily loaf. In the Business School 
instruction has for some time been given in all those 
branches of knowledge which are essential to a success- 
ful commercial career, and we have already set on foot 
a department, namely, that of the Domestic and Indus- 
trial Arts, which I hope will grow to large proportions as 
time goes on. But it is significant of our attitude here 
that we did not choose for this new department such 
titles as that of Domestic Science, Manual Training, 
Trade School or School of Technology. We purpose 
emphasizing the artistic, the aesthetic, aspect of daily life. 
We wish, for example, that our young ladies should not 
merely understand the chemistry of food and be able to 
cook a wholesome dish, but that they should know how to 



22 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

prepare and serve, to preside over, and to partake of, a 
meal with such precision and delicacy and deftness and 
daintiness both of feeling and of touch that the process 
shall be as truly aesthetic as is the carving of a statue — ■ 
that there shall be eliminated from it whatever is offen- 
sive, crude, rude, hasty and bestial. We wish them to 
learn how to be the mistress and not the slave of one's 
household work, and how to give that indescribable and 
unmistakable touch to the home, whether it be a palace 
in the heart of the city or a cabin in the thick of the 
piney woods, which shall make it, not a place in which 
to eat by day and sleep by night and breed one's kind, but 
a haven of refuge, a shadow as of a great rock in a dry 
and thirsty land. Already during the past semester, this 
aim has been largely realized in those who have attended 
the classes in cooking and in basketry ; may it never be 
less emphasized in the future development of this De- 
partment. Of what use to teach men how to make a 
living if we do not teach them also how to make life 
worth while? 

A college, I say, our institution will remain, as distin- 
guished from a university on the one hand, and a school 
of technology on the other. 

And in the second place, Rollins is, and will continue 
to be, a Christian college. 

For one, I do not see how our public schools, whether 
of lower or higher grade, can properly profess and pro- 
pagate the Christian faith. They are supported by taxes 
levied on the property of all our citizens, Protestant, 
Catholic, Jewish, agnostic, and infidel, and they are open 
on equal terms to the children of all these several ele- 
ments of the population. That dissociation of church and 
state which is a fundamental feature of our American 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 23 

life renders it improper, so it seems to me, to force any 
. form of religious faith upon the attention of those who 
conscientiously reject it, in institutions supported from 
the public treasury. The teacher in the public school 
may win his pupils to the Christian life by his faithful 
and radiant Christian character, and by such instructions 
and persuasions as he may find opportunity to bring to 
bear upon them outside the hours and occupations of the 
school-room, but secular the public school itself must be. 
And it is this fact which makes imperative the need of 
private institutions like our own, scattered everywhere 
through the body politic, which are confessedly founded 
upon the Christian faith and which seek to exercise over 
their students and upon the public a positive religious 
influence. For religion and culture have mutual 
need of one another. Culture needs religion to 
give to it a solid philosophical basis, and sense 
of the coherence and continuity of all life as ground- 
ed in God, seriousness and stability of purpose, un- 
selfishness and sincerity of spirit, adequate and unfail- 
ing motive, and that atmosphere of reverence, of humil- 
ity, of purity, of generosity and of spirituality, without 
which culture is cold and sterile — for it is still true that 
"knowledge puffeth up but love buildeth up." But re- 
ligion needs culture to give to it reality and sanity, 
breadth, balance, proportion — to temper, but not to 
quench its fires, to guide, but not to extirpate its en- 
thusiasm. We shall therefore seek to blend here religion 
and culture ; our confessed and definite aim is, that every 
student who goes out from among us shall be at once 
an educated man and a Christian disciple. But when I 
speak of Christianity, I mean a Christianity which is rea- 
sonable and vital, compatible with intellectual integrity, 



24 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

and comprehensive of all life and truth; a Christianity 
which is free from the elements of sentimentalism, su- 
perstition, hysteria and dogmatism; the Christianity not 
of the theologians but of Jesus Himself. I mean the 
Christianity of St. Paul in his highest and most universal 
moods, in which he saw that all things, whether "Paul 
or Apollos or Cephas" — that is, all biography and his- 
tory, all the poets and seers and orators ; or the "world" 
— that is, the universe of things and the frame of man, 
with all their laws and forces; or "life or death" — that 
is, all the ideas and ideals, the passions and aspirations, 
the toils and recreations, by which our days are filled, 
and which, quenched here at last, are to revive in the 
life eternal; or "things present or things to come" — 
that is, all the precious heritage of the past, and those 
continents of experience as yet undiscovered toward 
which with high and growing hope the Christian portion 
of mankind is pressing on — that all these are the precious 
possession of the Christian man. Surely a Christianity 
like this is congenial to culture; "those whom God hath 
joined together let no man put asunder."' 

It agrees with this view of the matter, that our college 
cannot be sectarian. It was founded, indeed, by Con- 
gregationalists, and has always been sustained and man- 
aged in large degree by Christian men of that confes- 
sion; for this service we are not ungrateful, and of this 
fact we are not ashamed. Whatever one may say of 
New England Puritanism in other aspects of it, our 
nation, north and south and east and west, should never 
forget — nay, in this one thing let us glory while we have 
any being — that this company of people have founded 
more schools and colleges by far than any other body 
of Christian believers of like size, and have been more 



ITS FIELD AND ITS FUTURE 25 

lavish and tireless in the support of these institu- 
tions, and more exacting as to the standards they should 
maintain. From Harvard and Yale to Yankton and 
Whitman they stretch, an unbroken line of lights for the 
illumination of the people. But these colleges have never 
in recent years been sectarian in any offensive sense of 
that word; they have been a free gift to all the people, 
of whatever confession and of none. On our Board of 
Trustees and faculty seven or eight denominations, north 
and south, are represented, and no influence will ever be 
brought to bear upon any student here to divert him 
from the faith of his fathers, or in the least weaken his 
affection for it. The day of the sectarian college, if it 
ever existed, is forever gone by. 

And what of the future? 

Permit me to remind you that I am no newcomer, in- 
toxicated by the mild air, the blue sky, the unwonted 
and delicious fragrance of orange blossoms, the mad joy 
of mating mockingbirds. For nearly a score of years I 
have studied assiduously the industrial conditions of 
Florida; with my own hands I have planted, cultivated 
and harvested her products; I have sunk my few and 
hard-earned pennies in her thirsty sands; I have seen 
her devastated by frosts ; I have witnessed the Abomina- 
tion of Desolation standing in her holy places — the pines 
and oaks and weeds stealing slowly back into the fields 
where fruit trees once grew, and the homes which shel- 
tered happy households vacant everywhere and in ruins — 
I have seen all this, yet never for one moment has the 
conviction wavered within me that this Commonwealth 
has before it a future of great and singular prosperity. 
Beyond doubt, there are united here conditions of soil, of 
climate, of location, and manifold resources almost un- 



26 ROLLINS COLLEGE 

touched as yet which are the guarantee that these wil- 
dernesses are to blossom as the rose. It will not do to 
import hither processes of exploitation which are adapted 
to our more northern latitudes — this is the mistake of the 
immigrant ; nor will it do to leave the development of the 
country to those crude and wasteful methods which have 
prevailed here in time past — this is the mistake of the 
native. Native and newcomer must both understand that 
brain and brawn and capital must conspire, first to study 
and then to conquer conditions which are wholly peculiar. 
To understand and to master the country — this is man's 
sole industrial task in Florida. But I foresee the time, 
not far away, when our enormous resources of timber 
shall be at once conserved and exploited; when our end- 
less stretches of flat woods shall support herds of cattle 
and of swine, and flocks of sheep which — fattened on 
those extraordinary foods which nature has given us as 
in compensation for our poor and scanty grasses, and 
slaughtered at some central point — shall feed a hungry 
world; when our hammocks, glades and prairies shall 
pour an immense and continuous stream of food-stuffs 
into the frozen north the winter through; when citrus 
and other fruits shall be grown in our piney woods in a 
profusion and of a quality not elsewhere to be matched; 
when factories for the canning of surplus products and 
the manufacture of our lumber and fibrous plants into 
forms of use and beauty, and for the spinning and weav- 
ing of cotton goods, and the manufacture of sugar and 
of fertilizers in almost limitless quantities, shall be mul- 
tiplied within our borders ; and when the thousand miles 
of our seacoast — an amount as great as that which 
stretches from Maine to Virginia — and our inland waters 
shall yield a supply of seafood of divers sorts, hitherto 



ITS; FIELD AND [ITS FUTURE 27 

undreamed of and vastly greater than that of any other 
American Commonwealth ; and when our commerce with 
Europe, with South America and with the Orient, 
through ports artificially deepened and through the Pan- 
ama Canal, will be the source of immense revenue to 
ourselves and of blessing to the world. 

It is, I believe, a sober guess that ten millions of people 
will ultimately have their homes in Florida — and even so, 
it would be less crowded than Connecticut now is, hardly 
more than half so crowded as is Massachusetts. And 
it is for these millions, not for to-day, that we are build- 
ing this College. It is that this coming multitude may be 
equipped for the industrial tasks which await them here, 
and even more — more by far — that they may forever be 
reminded of tasks higher and more rewarding than those 
which are industrial, that we establish here on firm foun- 
dations this institution. May it proclaim to the coming 
generations that life is more than meat and the body than 
raiment; that no man, no state, no nation, can live by 
bread alone, but that the real life is the life of truth, of 
goodness, of duty and of love. 



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